It begins almost casually. A single concentrated stream of birds breaks for the trees, the stands of trees that have remained almost unnoticed until this point. Inconsequential while the drama built all around them, the woods known as Buckenham Carrs have grown steadily darker with the onset of night. Now that they have moved centre stage they have become a brooding cavity in the landscape. The birds pour into the airspace above it in ever-growing numbers, and they mount the air until there are so many and the accompanying calls are so loud that I instinctively search for marine images to convey both the sea roar of sounds and the blurry underwater shapes of the flock. It becomes a gyroscope of tightly packed fish roiling and twisted by the tide; it has the loose transparent fluidity of a jellyfish, or the globular formlessness of an amoeba – one that spreads for a kilometre and a half across the heavens.

Cooker later explains why the surrounding Yare Valley supports so many rooks. In its origin the rook is a bird of the Asian steppes, which spread into Europe with ancient deforesation. Here in the Yare valley is the biggest surviving area of lowland grassland in England and is thus ideal rook habitat.

Cromer

During the 1880s so many people crowded on to trains from London to see the hotly blushing hilltops above the cliffs from Cromer to Overstrand that the resort was successfully promoted as ‘Poppyland’.

Mammoths

The Cromer Forest-bed is world-renowned for the thousands of fossils mammals such as mammoth, rhino and hippo that have been discovered over the last 250 years” here

The oldest and largest mammoth ever found in Britain was unearthed in 1990 in the cliffs of West Runton. The animal was a steppe mammoth (Mammuthus trogontherii) would weighed twice a modern African elephant.

Cormorant fishing in Thetford

“The first account of cormorant fishing in England dates back to 1610 in a French-speaking description of a tour of Duke Ludwig Friedrich of
Württemberg-Mömpelgard. On 8th May the German nobleman stayed
in Thetford:

Then His Excellency dined with His Majesty, and after leaving the table they drove to the river in a coach, where they watched cormorants – birds diving into the water on a signal of their master, who trained them, and catching eels or other fish, and are initiated by another signal to hand them over and spit them out alive – a wonderful thing to be witnessed.